F all the job titles going, few come with a more intimidating provenance than that of head gardener. Perhaps it is something to do with our literary as well as our horticultural history. As children, the first head gardener most of us were introduced to came courtesy of Beatrix Potter in . As a result, we grew up with an image of the head gardener as a bearded, bespectacled old grump who liked his vegetables in serried ranks and his rabbits in a pie.
